The government has gone cold on Cool Britannia. But Britain’s artists and designers are still making a hot contribution to the economy

IT IS Turner Prize time again, and Britain's modern artists are doing their best to confirm the popular impression that they are a bunch of pretentious time-wasters. The £20,000 ($29,000) prize is Britain's most important contemporary art award, and the judges are used to generating controversy. Damien Hirst's pickled sheep have won, and last year Tracey Emin's stained, unmade bed caught the headlines. This year was no different. Among the entries are a pile of old traffic signs and bollards (plus the occasional filing cabinet) by Tomoko Takahashi, entitled “Learning to Drive”.

But the Turner Prize now attracts just plain derision as much as controversy. This year, a group of self-appointed traditional painters have even launched a counter movement called the “Stuckists”. They have derided the Turner Prize as “an on-going national joke”, and have promised to picket the televised awards dinner dressed as clowns.

The Stuckists are part of a backlash against the “Cool Britannia” phenomenon of the mid-1990s. When the Blair government came to power, it lost no opportunity to laud artists and designers. Chris Smith, the culture secretary, wrote a book called “Creative Britain” celebrating the economic and cultural value of the “creative industries”. Robin Cook, the foreign secretary, ostentatiously took down some of the dusty old portraits in his office, and replaced them with bits of modern art. Tony Blair entertained pop stars and designers at Downing Street.

But the government has become uneasy about all the derision this attracted and has dropped the phrase “Cool Britannia” from the official vocabulary. The turning point was probably the fiasco of the Millennium Dome, which was meant to harness the best in British design to provide a national showcase—but which turned into a loss-making embarrassment.

Now that the fad has passed in Westminster, however, it is worth pointing out that—beyond all the hype—there is something real going on. Britain's art schools are booming, and so are the design industries that feed off them. Art and design courses are still attracting record numbers of students, and, remarkably, the art and design industries are still offering more and more jobs. Despite the discredited rhetoric, it can be argued, as Christopher Frayling, rector of the Royal College of Art (RCA), does, that now, even more than in the mid-1990s, “Globally, people are looking to Britain as an art and design services centre.”

There is no doubt that the pop-star status accorded to the icons of “Cool Britannia”, such as Damien Hirst or James Dyson, the designer of the eponymous vacuum-cleaner, inspired more teenagers to go into art and design than ever before. In 1999, one in every 19 university applicants wanted to study art and design. Five years ago, the figure was just one in 61. According to the further-education funding council, in 1998-99 there were 222,573 art and design students, an increase of 62% on 1995, compared with an overall growth of 48% over the same period. The university admissions service UCAS confirms that this upward growth is continuing this year.

Furthermore, Britain now attracts more overseas students to its art and design colleges than to any other comparable institutions. The all-postgraduate RCA has 840 students, of whom 266 are from overseas; 182 are from Europe. They pay £18,000 a year for the privilege, a testament to how sought-after these places are. The London Institute, responsible for several of the capital's top art and design colleges such as the London College of Fashion and Central Saint Martin's College of Art and Design, charge £8,000 a year in overseas fees. But they still report a rapid increase in the number of foreign students, especially from Japan.

In this context, the Turner Prize tells its own story. Of this year's four finalists, only one is British-born. But the other three all live and work in Britain, and two, including Ms Takahashi, studied here.

Even if the art and design schools are still bursting to the seams with eager young students, are there any jobs for these people when they leave? A few years ago even the optimists such as Mr Frayling were fearful that the colleges were churning out so many graduates that many of them would be destined to do nothing much more productive than revert to the traditional trade of the art school graduate, and play bass guitar in deservedly obscure rock bands.

But even here, the picture is still very positive. Those who stick to fine arts still run a risk of starving in a garret. But the Design Council estimates that the design industry, broadly defined, now employs about 300,000 people. It quotes a London Business School study which puts the value of design to the British economy at £12 billion. And the industry is growing. Fee income in 1999 for the top 100 design consultancies was up 20% on 1998 to £490m, and they are still expanding. Such growth has been fuelled by the expansion of digital-media work, like the design of computer games, in which Britain is a world leader.

Aidan Walker, a critic with Blueprint, a design magazine, points to the fact that this expansion in the industry is matched by an increasing consumer appetite for styling and design. There has been a rash of prime-time television programmes such as “Changing Rooms” and “Ground Force” dedicated to home and garden improvement. Even Wedgwood, a byword for staid conservatism, has just launched two new ceramics ranges by contemporary artists. Ford has announced plans to locate its advanced car-styling centre in Britain to take advantage of London's status as a leading centre of design. Perhaps it should also consider entering some of its industrial waste for the Turner Prize.